Extend or Resize Boot Camp Partition

From Mac Guides

If you are running Windows in Boot Camp and find that you need more space in your Windows partition, there are a number of ways to re-allocate space between the partitions. Of course these could also be used to make the Windows partition smaller and increase the size of the Mac OS partition if needed.

WARNING: Resizing partitions, even non-destructively is a task that should not be undertaken without a backup. Backup early and backup often!

Contents

Paragon CampTune

Paragon CampTune is a commercial product that is designed expressly for this task. http://www.paragon-software.com/home/camptune/ It consists of a downloadable ISO that needs to be burned to a disc and booted from in order to resize the partitions. During testing it was available free, but now costs US$19.95. MR user Rodus reports that it damaged their OS X partiton and a reinstall was required, so heed the warning and have a backup.

GParted Live

GParted Live is similar to CampTune as it is also distributed as a bootable image that needs to be copied to a CD/DVD or USB flash drive. As free and open source software, distributed under the GPL, it will always be available free. Since it has more functions than CampTune, it may be harder for folks who are not as experienced with partitioning hard drives. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

iPartition

Coriolis Systems' iPartition is a £29.95 ($44.95 US) utility that runs in Mac OS X and allows resizing of all of the relevant partition formats, including HFS+, FAT32, and NTFS. It provides a Mac-oriented user interface that may be easier to manage than some of the free utilities. As it is not capable of resizing the boot disk, it requires a bootable external disk or a boot DVD. (A tool to create a boot DVD is included.)

Paragon Partition Manager

From the makes of CampTune is a commercial tool that is similar in functionality to GParted Live, but has a more polished/friendly user interface than GParted Live. Previously only the US$79.95 Professional version supported all the features required for this, but as of version 11 the US$39.95 Personal version has also been reported to work. http://www.paragon-software.com/home/pm-personal/

Winclone/Disk Utility

NOTE: Winclone 3.x is now commercial software available from Twocanoes for US$19.99. MR user vesposit has used it to resize his Windows partition as described in this thread.

Winclone 2.x is a free tool for creating and restoring backup images of your Windows partition. One of its key features is that it can restore to a larger partition than the one the image was created from.

NOTE: Winclone 2.x has been discontinued, but for now remains available and capable of completing these tasks (including creating and restoring Windows 7 images for Snow Leopard or earlier).

Disk Utility can resize HFS+ (Mac OS) partitions, but is currently incapable of resizing NTFS partitions, so you could use it to reduce the size of the HFS+ partition and create a new larger placeholder MS-DOS (FAT) partition

The full process would be:

Backup Windows partition with Winclone.

(if the new Windows partition is smaller than the old one make sure you set the preferences in Winclone to save the image as an uncompressed dmg)

Native OS utilities

MR user Kazyuareports that you can use the disk management utilities provided with the current operating systems if you want to do it manually. Windows 7 and OS X both have partition resizing functions built in. In OS X, open Disk Utility and manually shrink the mac HFS+ partition by dragging the lower right corner. Then in windows go to the start menu and type "disk management" into the search box then hit enter. You should get an overview of the drives you have and the individual partitions. Right-clicking on the partition gives an "Extend Volume" option. The Windows NTFS volume should then be extended into the free space you created with Disk Utility. This method has not worked for other users, so try at your own risk.